1. Field of the Invention
This invention generally relates to an information medium recognition device and more particularly to a device for recognizing an information medium such as a handwritten signature inputted by what is called offline input operation, which is not connected to an online terminal or the like.
2. Description of The Related Art
A typical conventional character recognition device for recognizing a character input by what is called offline input operation, which is not connected to an online terminal or the like, is an optical character reader (OCR) which generally has a configuration illustrated in FIG. 11.
Namely, in the device of FIG. 11, a character handwritten on a recording medium such as paper is optically read by a scanner 1 and data representing the read character is generated. Subsequently, in a pre-processing portion 2, a process for eliminating the influence of the recording medium and noises or the like is performed on the data representing the handwritten character. The resultant data (hereunder sometimes referred to as handwritten character data) is stored in a storage portion 3.
Then, features (i.e., singularity points) are extracted from the handwritten character data, which is thus stored in the portion 3, by a feature extraction portion 4. Thus, data (hereunder sometimes referred to as singularity point data) representing the extracted feature is obtained by feature extraction portion 4. Namely, character information represents singularity points of each character. Further, each character can be identified by the combination of such singularity points. Therefore, the singularity point data representing features of a character to be recognized is stored in a dictionary portion 6. Then, in a comparison portion 5, the singularity point data representing the singularity point extracted by the feature extraction portion 4 is compared with the singularity point data stored in the dictionary portion 8 serially by performing, for instance, what is called a pattern matching method. Further, the character corresponding to one of the singularity point data stored in the portion 8, which data has a minimum error (namely, the stored singularity point data best agrees with the singularity point data representing the extracted singularity point) is judged to be the character read by the scanner 1. Then, data representing this result of the judgement is output through an output portion 7 and an output terminal 8 to an external device.
However, in such conventional character recognition device, objects to be recognized are characters which can be registered as what are called printing types. In contrast, in cases of handwritten characters such as signatures., there are differences in shape of each character among signers. Moreover, there are subtle differences among signatures written by a same person. Thus singularity point data corresponding to each of such characters cannot be uniquely set. Consequently, the conventional character recognition device has a drawback in that it is difficult to recognize handwritten characters, for example, signatures. The present invention is accomplished to eliminate such a drawback of the conventional device.
It is, accordingly, an object of the present invention to provide an information medium recognition device which can recognize an information medium such as a handwritten signature input by effecting what is called an offline input operation.